This invention relates to fluorochlorohydrocarbon-free cleaning compositions composed of alcohols.
High demands relating to the solvent properties with respect to the impurities to be removed are made on solvents for cleaning electronic components, printed circuit boards, sensitive apparatus components, precision instruments and protective circuits, such as ground fault circuit breakers. Since these demands cannot as a rule be met by only one single pure solvent, solvent mixtures are often used in the prior art for industrial cleaning processes. Many prior art solvent mixtures contain fluorochlorohydrocarbons as the main solvent due to their well-known good solvent properties. However, the fluorochlorohydrocarbons have the major disadvantage that they contribute to the dangerous decrease of the ozone content in the upper air layers of the Earth's atmosphere. Due to this environment-harming property of fluorochlorohydrocarbons, it is desirable to replace cleaning compositions which contain these fluorochlorohydrocarbons with alternative cleaning compositions which contain solvents which are less harmful in this respect. Furthermore, it is already known in the prior art to add alcohols as co-solvents to the fluorochlorohydrocarbons; the use of alcohols alone as the main solvent was not successful in difficult applications.